Hi, everyone.
Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally celebrated
poet, translator, scholar, editor, and performer
with more than 90 books of poetry
and 12 assemblages of traditional and avant
garde poetry such as Technicians of the Sacred
and the multi-volume Poems for the Millennium.
His most recent big books are Eye of Witness:
A Jerome Rothenberg Reader and Barbaric, Vast,
and Wild: A Gathering of Outside and Subterranean Poetry
from Origins to Present, which is volume five of Poems
for the Millennium.
A new book of poems, A Field on Mars: Poems 2000 to 2015,
is forthcoming in joint English and French editions.
Rothenberg is among the most prolific and influential
writers whose works grace the shelves of the Poetry Center's
library.
We have been collecting his work here
since the 1960s when the Poetry Center had not 47,000 books
but only 1,000 books if that.
His work has been in constant consultation
ever since, informing multiple generations of writers
right up to the present and will continue to do so.
When we say that a writer's work is vital,
we commonly mean that it is important, essential.
When it comes to Jerome Rothenberg,
we mean this and something more.
His poetry, scholarship, and translations
are brimming with vitality, with dazzling energy.
Rothenberg's visit to us tonight,
happily coinciding with his appearance as a keynote speaker
for the American Literary Translators Association Annual
Conference, has been greatly anticipated
and has been a long time in coming.
So let's all welcome warmly Jerome Rothenberg.